Something else makes me happy. While they were empire-building and trying to recruit every major blogger and organization to their banner, they never asked me to join. Not once. Not so much as a casual inquiry. They’re calling me a “foremost leader”, so it can’t just be that they thought I was of no consequence — I think they knew that my laughter over the phone might prove deafening. Or that they already hated the idea of sharing a space with them.

Well, it’s Freethoughblogs, the atheist equivalent of Communist Russia with all that social justice and so forth. The Free World, embodied by the SCAGSCSPI, could never bow down misguided fanaticis such as yourself, PZ, much less ally themselves to you. Led by great men like Shermer and Dawkins and the occasional token woman, capitatheism shall prevail!*

*This would be the perfect excuse to mint some In Shermer We Trust coins. Worth sod all because noone wants them, they could be used to fill in lakes or as ballast to help balance the cargo aboard ships and airplanes.

P.S.: If you do get into another cold war, please, please, please start another space race. The last one was such a boon to our species.

I just can’t get over this idea that groups were supposed to “join” in order for the SPI to basically take credit for any work that group did. At least that is what is sounds like. The SPI doesn’t appear to have actually produced anything – well anything other than smarmy photos and mind-boggling displays of hubris.

Do they think that they are still the cool kids at high school and that if “we” will do their homework, “we” will be more an adequately repaid by being allowed to hang out with them ? That seems to be the mentality.

Especially since their goal seems to be smarming up so that they (the “thinky” ones) can hang out with the even cooler kids – politicians and religious leaders. All that needle moving they are apparently doing somewhere. (Ick that was an image I could have done without).

Do they think that they are still the cool kids at high school and that if “we” will do their homework, “we” will be more an adequately repaid by being allowed to hang out with them ? That seems to be the mentality.

Well, given how readily Nugent and Lindsay, among others, are to do just that…

Do they think that they are still the cool kids at high school and that if “we” will do their homework, “we” will be more an adequately repaid by being allowed to hang out with them ? That seems to be the mentality.

Pretty much. If they’re not the cool kids, I guess we’re supposed to think of them as mercenaries and bullies (or a protection racket?), which we want our side and can’t do without, even though they don’t actually give a shit or contribute anything that’s useful or any good at all. That’s somehow supposed to be their sales pitch.

The bad news is that they want to break up now, because we’re just not good enough for them. So sad. We’ll always have Paris, assholes. Now just fucking leave already.

Now don’t I feel silly? But it makes Shermer’s arm slung around her shoulders feel like more of an intentional statement. See? Nice guy. He’s like this all the time. The entire shot is somewhat casual, but that still rings as out of place. Or perhaps I’m reading too much into it.

Their primary goal is to perpetuate right wing ideologies in the atheist movement. The right has understood for a while now, that while the conservative Christians have been very useful, their numbers are falling, and they need a new brand of tools. Good for them, the “libertarian” movent tried something similar a long time ago.

Damn you Kitty, I was going to do a joke about the Popular People’s Secular Coalition Front for America. Where white guys like me would spend the day waggling our fingers at people that don’t respect us, or the nice pastor that lives up the road from us.

Is mangling names of organizations as petty as mangling individual people’s names?
Because, as mentioned elsewhere, I think I may not be able to help but see their name as the Secular Policing Institute.

Further to my comment on “professionalism” of yesterday: You also don’t include cat jokes in your official informational material (including your website). I mean, I take a back seat to no one in my affection for our feline friends, but it really makes you look like you’re not to be taken seriously. Also: try to avoid being founded by a convicted con-man.

With apologies to Monty Python, and anyone who has already thought of doing this:

“Are you the Secular Policy Front?”
“Secular Policy People’s Front! We’re The People’s Front of
Secular Policy! Secular Policy People’s Front, God!”
“Listen, the only people we hate more
than the Romans, are the fucking Secular Policy People’s Front.”
“And the Secular Policy Popular People’s Front!
And the People’s Front of Secular Policy!”
“The People’s Front of Secular Policy. Splitters!”
“We are the People’s Front of Secular Policy!”
“Oh. I thought we were the Popular Front.”
“People’s Front! God…”
“Whatever happened to the Popular Front?”
“He’s over there.”

Thank you for the transcript, sprocket. I envision PZ as being the Popular Front in this setup — he’s got the beard for it!

chigau: basically every pharyngula home page has one or more youtube embeds in it, so your browser has already loaded all the associated resources just by going to the home page. After that, it’s quite cheap to add one more embed. What I notice bogging my browser down is the ads: unlike Google, a lot of ads networks don’t seem to think that responsiveness is useful.

WMDkitty: you gave us a fish so we can eatwatch videos for a day. Can you teach me how to fish?

numerobis
My iPad reloads the page every time I click on the tab.
…
If you want to embed a video copy/paste the address into your comment.
It embeds automatically.
If you want to be polite, don’t make the address the last thing in your comment, then it doesn’t embed.
Previewing is a good idea.

In addition to link descriptions (and simply seeing the web address, when that’s informative), there’s also the option of getting an add-on for firefox (like Thumbnail Zoom Plus but I’m sure there are others) that shows a thumbnail of the youtube video (or other image links) with a mouseover, as you would see with embedded videos. You can fiddle around with options if you don’t like it happening in certain places, but it’s pretty useful generally. And I guess I use a greasemonkey script or something to prevent auto-embedding here, because I think it’s annoying. So embedded or not, the page isn’t clogged up, and it’s my choice whether I want to judge a youtube link based on its “cover,” which is easily done with my mouse. Anyway, these days, a lot of what optimizes your web surfing or makes it more convenient for you personally is not really up to other people.

Sounds like a bunch of creepy/skeevy people in search of legitimacy and validation. When I get that vibe off someone, I run like hell – because people like that are always followed by a trail of drama and conflict.

Harumph! Harumph I say. That blighter from the provinces, ZP Mayer or whatever his name is, is a bloody bounder. He was rude to that Irish chappie, I forget his name, Nougat or something like that. Anyway, old Nougat has tossed Mayer out of his club. What say we support Nougat by tossing Mayer out of our club.

Is this Mayer a member of our club?

Pish. Tish even. It makes no difference whether Mayer belongs to our club or not. We don’t want his type in our club so we’ll ban him preemptively. A rotter like Mayer doesn’t think thinky thoughts like us and might not even recognize our primacy in the secular globe of which we are the Institute of which or something. Sorry, lost my train of thought for a moment there. Anyway, we’ll not only not extend an invitation to Mayer to join our club, we’ll make sure he does not join by making him an ex-member before he even becomes a member.

Al Dente, the fucking Irish wanker is simply a neocon. Why else would he fall out with PZ, who has led the charge against the fucking neocons.

New White Supremacist Atheists became the new Islamophobes, their invectives against Muslims resembling the rowdy, uneducated ramblings of backwoods racists. The Irish wanker is simply a fucking by-product of this thinking. Only fuckng neocons smear. PZ is simply telling the truth!

I’m so fucking rage-filled with the New White Supremacist Atheists at the moment.